Ice and Ashes
by Phoenix To Flame
Summary: Both the antithesis of fire. Springing from the ashes of the end is difficult, but with someone at your side, it's possible. Fuuma/Subaru
1. Prologue

So...my grand adventure into the land of a what-if after X begins! While I do actually have this whole story plotted out, the road between this chapter and the last one still has a long way to go (mostly because my procrastinating skills are second to none) and I'm looking forwards to the journey.

Much credit must be given to _Fields of Paper/Otter Than Most_ for both helping me immensely with this story in fleshing it out and guiding it on its path, and for drawing the lovely cover art. She's just completely amazing and I couldn't imagine what I'd be like without her alternating between gently pushing and roughly shoving me into everything.

Lessee...warnings...the only ones I can think of at the start are _character__ death_ in the sense that everyone who died before the last instalment are still dead, plus several as of yet unrevealed who died during the battle, and _angst_, because survivor's guilt is very heavy.

Also shh, I know it's short. This is the _prologue_, it will get longer. Like everything does when I get my hands on it...

* * *

_The Last Promise_

_All fell apart, I could not restart_

_A wish so broken. Sad words left unspoken._

* * *

The new year was cold. Very cold, the ice of January sinking into his blood and chilling out even the life that he'd sworn to live for all who weren't anymore.

It was night, he knew that, and yet it could have been day for all of the light the new year had cast so far, dimmed by the swirling clouds of smoke and ashes that turned all the world to grey and loneliness.

He'd sworn to live for them, but was wandering endlessly in a dead city really living? All that seemed to thrive in the life he'd fought so hard for were the carrion birds, swooping down and shredding at any unlucky enough not to escape the ruins around them, cawing and attacking each other in good humor and fluttering to the remains of the buildings on shadowed wings.

The trees in Ueno park hissed as the chilling wind swept through empty branches, scraping the last leaves still littering the ground in front of him, and he shivered involuntarily as it cut through the tatters of his coat, leaving him numb on the outside as well.

At least his boots weren't shredded to pieces, if his feet were as unprotected as the rest of him, they probably would have just broken off by then. As it was, they seemed to grow heavier with each passing footstep.

Kamui's blood still lingered on his hands, even though the flecks of brown had long since fallen off, he could see it easily, a stain that would never fully wash away. That was probably for the best, he would never forget that way. He would always carry that weight. Along with Kotori's. Both of them.

He had to carry it, so they wouldn't be forgotten.

He'd gone back to the shrine at first, but it was...uninhabitable. The trees had collapsed on the house in the earthquakes that had shaken up the whole of Tokyo, his fault again. Strange, how everything could be traced back to him, that it was easy to rationalize everything being his own fault.

Good.

His feet were heavy, weary. The cold swallowed him up and left him strangely peaceful. He needed something, a place to sit. A bench up ahead caught his eyes, and he stumbled for it, whatever strength that had carried him through the days since the end failing at last, and when he hit the bench, he collapsed against it, nothing left to carry him.

_Is this what dying feels like_? He wondered dimly as the single streetlight in his view seemed to flicker out and in again. He hoped that he wasn't dying, that would be disappointing after all of the things he'd sworn to stay for.

Strange, he could hear footsteps now, slightly uneven and strong. They were walking closer to him, in and out, in and out. Suddenly all sorts of things were clear, like the fact that the last time he'd had anything to drink was at least two days ago...

...how did that chant go? Three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food?

Well he _was_ a fool then.

The footsteps came closer, and closer, and stopped. He'd closed his eyes at some point, and he felt too weary to open them. He could feel the weight of _someone_ staring at him. Who was undetermined.

There was a long pause, and then a quiet voice, one he knew far better than he'd thought, spoke. "Do you want to stay here?"

He didn't know how to answer that. The answer of the side that was full of guilt for what he'd done was convinced that yes, he should. Staying on a freezing bench alone, dying of thirst seemed like the beginnings of a suitable punishment for what he'd done, though he could never fully atone for what he'd done in the sake of trying to make an ending not happen, and yet...

And yet there was the small part of him that wanted to go anywhere that wasn't there, that wanted to stand up and walk away from that bench and keep living.

How horribly selfish he was.

Somehow, the other person could see his dilemma, and even more, what the answer that he couldn't choose was. Warm hands, gloved hands, slipped under his chest, and with surprising strength, he was lifted off of the bench. There was the gentle tingle of magic wrapping around him, an illusion? He would have known if he wasn't so disoriented, but it was as light as a butterfly's wing and just as uncatchable as sunlight.

"If you want to try when you're awake again, find me." the soft voice said again, and Fuuma fell asleep, his dreams too dark to be the dreams of death.


	2. Chapter One

It only took me six months to write this chapter, as opposed to the eight for the previous one, I'm making progress!

* * *

He woke up in a bed that seemed softer than snowflakes, although that could easily be attributed to the fact that while he was no longer specifically dying, he still felt like all of the sand of the world had replaced his bones in his twisted dreams.

Fuuma sat up slower, and watched the room slowly appear as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. He was lying in a bed large enough to hold at least one more person his size, possibly two if all of them had no problems touching each other while sleeping, and the walls were a bare white with only black bookcases, mostly emptied, to offset the boxlike feeling of it. There was a chair with an end table and a light on it, which he turned on once he managed to fight his way free of the tangle of blankets, and one book with a dissolving spine and nameless cover so only by opening would he find out what it was.

It was a room that was...resided in, for lack of a better word. Whoever had been in it before had taken no joy in it, no care, and only fitted it with things they felt were necessary to a bedroom. Which, to them, seemed to be a multitude of books.

It reminded him of his own room, back in a house and year and century ago from where he was, it was almost as empty. He hadn't felt a need to make it _his_ at heart, hadn't tried to claim it.

Then he'd gone through a year of death, and suddenly the loneliness of a room without care made sense.

He sat in the chair awkwardly, finding his legs more full of metaphoric sand than he liked, and discovered that it was almost as comfortable as the bed. He leaned back against the leather backrest and breathed for a moment, letting the signals of his body come to him.

It was embarrassingly loud when it did. His stomach gurgled in protest of how long it had been since he'd eaten anything of substance, and the nature of his dry throat protested almost as clearly. As much as staying in bed and sleeping for another amount of time that would be uncounted seemed appealing, the needs of eating and drinking astonishingly came first.

Even when he was dying, his body at least strove to life. A strange comfort, really, but if something, even just his own body, wanted him to live, that was a reason to try.

After a moment more of sitting in the chair, he stood up again, and stumbled to the door. He noted his shoes lying next to it, and realized that his rescuer had only removed his shoes before putting him to bed, and presumably gave his sleeping self _something_ to drink so he didn't die in his sleep. He debated for a moment whether or not to put them on, and then decided that since he was going back to bed anyway afterwards, it was a needless exercise.

The door was as silent as the rest of the house when he opened it, and it was going from sleep-inducing to slightly creepy, since if he was still in Tokyo, there would have been _some_ sound, whether of people cautiously creeping out of their homes after the earthquakes of last year ended to try and scrounge some relief out of the crumbled city, or just displaced birds fighting over the latest scraps of carrion, but even they were unheard.

The hallway he walked through was as sparse as the bedroom, at least with the lamps on to brighten the gloom, and the lights slightly warmed the dark wood of the floorboards as he walked away from the room at the end of the hall to the other end, seeing only two doors for all of the steps he had to take, although that could be explained by the fact that long powerful strides were still beyond his power at the time.

He came out into a living room that seemed at least a little less empty than the previous two rooms, the austerity of the decorations in it muted by the fact that it looked like a place where someone actually lived, and was simply very tidy for the most part, aside from yet more books on the cases around the room, and scattered across the glass coffee table. Whoever was there had clearly not bothered to put any of them away, while they were kept shut and off of their pages, that was it. The walls were painted with a sponged-on warm honey, and that more than anything brought a little life to the room. The floor was bare wood but for a wine-red carpet tucked under both white couches, and one of the chairs nearest the door had a long, heavy black coat tossed on it, like the owner had not bothered to use one of the coat hooks holding a rather more familiar set of trench coats.

He imagined that if he examined the cuffs of the coats, he would find splotches of blood still lining the wrists.

He walked through the room, and tendrils of cold air wrapped around his feet like snakes reaching for the first rays of sun, chilling him to the bone. The foyer was open to the living room, and the closet door would not open for him, although why he was trying it escaped him after the moment of tugging on it. Turning back around, he saw where the living room branched off into what was probably the kitchen, if the sum of the rooms was to be added up. There was light, filtered and grayish, but natural light, leaking through that doorway, and coloring the floor into a more gentle starkness.

He walked towards it, the cold seeping through his socks and into the bones of his feet so they started to throb in slow pain from walking so long, and came out into a kitchen indeed, one so austere that it really couldn't have been used all that often. The stench of dead food from the refrigerator might have been either a truth or a lie to his impression though. It was impossible to tell if it was, in fact, homemade and abandoned, or leftovers from exotic restaurants.

Knowing the previous owner of this apartment, either was possible. Of course, having now wandered the whole of the space, it was clear that the newer resident was not there at this time, and so it was up to him to see if he could find anything to eat.

He walked over to the refrigerator, and pulled it open, the suction action of what kept it shut seeming much stronger than before, and was greeted by neatly organized containers, stacked up in rows that spoke of careful arrangement. Judging from the dates written in a neat hand, they were all at least over a month overdue, fitting well with the time line of the last person who would have _used_ this kitchen anyway. After poking at the contents to see if any of them had still a hope of being edible, Fuuma shut the door again, and then poked in the freezer, which had more neat containers, and a surprising, or perhaps not so surprising amount of frozen sweets in boxes for thawing and cooking. Nothing really instant in there, which made sense, since the Sakurazukamori seemed less than pleased with anything not prepared recently, and freeze-dried was only allowed towards certain desserts.

He might very well end up eating tiramisu, or dulce de leche ice cream for his breakfast, if nothing else presented itself. And he didn't feel like continuing to snoop through the kitchen.

At least the Sakurazukamori had found it fit to leave a microwave in his kitchen, and soon he had an apple pie heating up in there, which although would taste like crap compared to when it went through the oven, he did not have the patience for messing with the oven and figuring out how long it would take for it to be done.

The whir and beep of the microwave working seemed to throw the silence of the space into painful awareness- it was far too loud for the whole apartment. As such, he was glad when it finished, and it only occurred to him afterwards that grabbing oven mitts to get out his steaming pie might be a good idea. Fuuma cursed himself as he almost dropped the pie on the counter, and managed to set it down before looking at his reddened hands and moving to promptly stick them under running water.

The cold bit into his hands, but it soothed the burns, and he let out a long breath as the pain subsided. He turned off the faucet and dried off his hands before returning to the steaming pie on the counter. The crust had cracked along the side, and he could smell cinnamon and apples in the steam.

It seemed more appetizing than anything had in a long time.

More carefully than before, he grabbed the dish towel and one of the cherry-blossom embossed white plates tucked away in the cupboard to get his pie set up, and managed to slide the whole thing onto it. The crust crumbled more as he did and some of the filling bubbled out, cooling off slowly as it encountered the cool air in the apartment.

He carried it over to the table and set it down before searching for the silverware, finding it neatly tucked away in a drawer, arranged so neatly that it was clear the previous Sakurazukamori had not liked his cutlery to be just tossed in the drawer. Grabbing a fork, the chill of the metal shocked him and he drew in a surprised breath, before the warmth of his hand soaked in and made it just bearable to the touch.

He walked back over to the table and sat down, watching the curls of steam dissipating in the air, waiting for it to be cool enough to eat. Though he hadn't seen a clock aside from the one on the microwave, time seemed to tick in the silence. He wondered how long the Sakurazukamori would be gone, or if he had any intent on returning.

It was lonely in the gloom.

He had almost dozed off when he noticed that the wisps of steam had ceased, and cautious poking revealed that it was finally cool enough to eat. Picking up his fork again, he took a piece of the crust off, seeing the sauce underneath let off a gasp of steam before cooling, and brought it to his mouth. It didn't smell especially appealing, but the fact that he hadn't eaten since last year was too much for him to care about.

He sighed and put the crust bit in his mouth. And it tasted like pie. Microwaved pie. He'd heard about your first meal in a long time being your best, but he supposed that didn't matter as much when you didn't really want to eat besides to sustain life.

The second bite was easier. The filling tasted much better than the crust, with hints of cinnamon and nutmeg and cloves in it, and the apples were surprisingly juicy for having been frozen and mass produced. He kept eating, feeling almost robotic about it, but determined not to starve himself any more.

He made it through less than a third before his throat closed up on him and he couldn't make himself take another bite. The crust on the fork looked wooden. He sighed, but it didn't change anything.

At least the yawning ache in his stomach was gone.

He scraped off the crust back into the mess and picked it up, carrying it over to the counter to search for something like aluminum foil or plastic wrap in the cupboards.

It was only a small exercise in frustration, he found foil in the drawer almost under the window, partially used. It was a little reassuring that way, that someone had used the kitchen. Of course, someone had lived here for almost a year, but it was the little things.

He finished covering it up, and put it in the fridge, pushing some of the gross containers out of the way. He would have to deal with them later, when he had more energy.

He bit back an unexpected yawn as he shut the fridge, and blinked in surprise. He'd been awake less than an hour, but already he could feel the hounds of weariness tugging at his heels. Calling him back to sleep.

He sighed, and started trudging down the hallway. Maybe in sleep, he wouldn't be left alone.


End file.
